“Happiness is a noun, so we think it’s something we can own,” Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert once said. “But happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live.”
That’s the place playwright Ken Weitzman wants to take audiences for The Happiness Gym, now in the midst of a National New Play Network rolling world premiere that began in April at Theatre Lab, the resident company of Florida Atlantic University, and next appears at Dallas’s Kitchen Dog Theatre this fall.
Billed as “a theatrical exercise in well-being,” the show builds on the work of the “positive psychology movement”—i.e., folks who have been studying happiness since the late 1990s. After decades of research into misery and the idea of “getting back to zero on the emotional number line,” as Weitzman put it, psychologists wondered: Where is the research into what’s above zero?
But as he dug into the studies on this question, he realized that the onus of implementation ultimately fell on the individual. He found “all of these exercises…really terrific,” but when he tried to make use of them, he said, “They just became another item on my to-do list. Eventually I didn’t do them, and that made me feel bad about myself for not even trying.”
The Happiness Gym seeks to collectivize these exercises. In its pilot run, done as part of a class at Stony Brook University in New York, the experience was broken into three spaces: good news, focused on sharing positive news stories read from scrolls at café tables; gratitude, in which participants wrote to thank folks for something they’ve done for them; and connection, which prompted participants to engage in deep conversations.
Even Weitzman admitted the concept can be hard to explain. So, for now, he’s tailoring the experience to fit each theatre’s space, season, and community. At Theatre Lab, for instance, he fit the concept into one space (with help from New York theatrical installation company New Neighborhood), while at Kitchen Dog, he’ll use the three curated areas as a way to introduce patrons to the theatre’s newly renovated space.
To steer future productions, he’s created a guidebook “more akin to what you might have with a dance piece or something like that, where it’s basic rules—movement for our hosts, how to welcome people, ways to talk about each exercise.” Weitzman emphasized that The Happiness Gym isn’t peddling “toxic positivity” or some kind of theatrical quick fix to “achieve” happiness. He does hope it’s something folks feel like they can revisit a number of times with friends, family, and community groups. If happiness can’t be owned, there’s no reason it can’t be a nice place to visit.
Jerald Raymond Pierce is the managing editor of American Theatre.
